St Leonard's

Some time around 926 to 930, King Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great and the first king to rule all of England, held a great council at Grateley. What it issued is known to historians as the Grateley Code, or II Athelstan, and it is the longest and most detailed set of laws to survive from Anglo-Saxon England.

It is a remarkable document to have come out of a Hampshire village. It set a single coinage for the whole kingdom and named the towns permitted to mint it, with the number of moneyers each was allowed. It dealt with theft, with the keeping of oaths, with trial by ordeal, and with the duty of every man to have a lord answerable for him. Behind the severity of its punishments sits a recognisably modern idea: that one law, and one money, should run the length of a country.

The council would have met in the open air or in a royal hall, not in this building, which came later. But it met here, on this ground, and that is worth standing still for.

Only the nave survives from the twelfth-century church. The chancel was rebuilt in the thirteenth century around a smaller earlier one, and the tower went up at the same time. The church was heavily restored in 1851, when the walls were refaced and new windows put in; the porch is modern.

Look for the small twelfth-century window with a semicircular head in the north wall of the nave, and the south doorway, partly of the same date, with chamfered jambs beneath a semicircular head.

Six fragments in the east window of the chancel, and a large medallion in a lozenge frame in the south-east window of the nave, were saved from the thirteenth-century glass that James Wyatt cleared out of Salisbury Cathedral. The grounds are deep blue with a yellow leaf pattern.

The medallion shows St Stephen, in alb, dalmatic and fanon, being stoned by two men, with the inscription stephs orans expirat: Stephen dies praying.

A tombstone in the churchyard remembers Joanna Elton, who died in 1782 aged ninety-five. On the back of the stone are verses asking that flowers should always grow on her grave. Writing in 1911, the Victoria County History noted that her wish was still being carefully attended to.

Two bells, both cast by John Wallis of Salisbury in 1583, read God be praysed and God be our guyd.

The circular font was found at Manor Farm and brought back; its base appears to be the base of a cross from somewhere else entirely.

The registers begin in 1624, but everything before 1643 was written down from memory after a fire in that year. A note records that the wooden spire was half carried away by wind in 1781, repaired, and later removed altogether.